The Open Window
by Rumour of an Alchemist
Summary: Several days after Harry Potter's first birthday, tragedy strikes in August of 1981. One-shot which diverges from canon during the story. Warning! Character death! Warning! This story is identified as 'Tragedy'.


(Slight revision for clarification, 2nd February, 2013)

Disclaimer: I am not J. K. Rowling. I do not own Harry Potter.

Note: The following one-shot is set in a universe which approximates to canon until the following events occur starting on a sticky August night in 1981. It's a little idea which occurred to me in between staring at other (ongoing) fanfiction projects.

Warning! Character-death. This story is identified as tragedy.

* * *

It was an unlikely hot and humid summer night, by British standards, in August. Lily Potter headed into the sitting room of the house where the Potter family were currently hiding, where she had last seen her son, intending to put him to bed, and spent five increasingly frantic minutes looking for him. Harry had barely turned one – he'd only had his birthday a few days ago.

She next went to the room which often served James as a makeshift 'workroom' where he spent hours on end at times transfiguring the furniture and blowing it up with hexes and jinxes, imagining that his targets were live Death Eaters. It was obvious from the sounds emerging that James was there, although a quick look around showed a worrying absence of Harry.

"James." Lily said to her husband, distracting him from his current activities. "Albus hasn't finally returned your cloak, and Harry's playing 'hide' under it, is he?"

"No." James said, slightly annoyed at the distraction, and at the reminder of the missing cloak. "The headmaster's still hanging on to it, and the last I saw of Harry, he was playing on that toy broom Sirius got him for his birthday." He glanced at his watch. "That must have been about twenty minutes ago. I left him in the sitting room and closed the door so he couldn't get out. I *really* needed to vent after that last message came through, and I thought he'd be okay playing on his own for a few minutes before you put him to bed."

"I've told you, James, you need to _watch_ him when he's on that broom." Lily fretted.

"It shouldn't go more than a few feet 'up', and it's not as if he could get out of the house, anyway…" James began.

Something belatedly registered in Lily Potter's mind, and a look of alarm hit her face.

"James. Did you check the windows in the sitting room?"

"Of _course_ I made sure the curtains were drawn shut – as per our black-out policy – as soon as the light outside began to fade earlier in the evening…" James began.

"No, James. The _windows_." Lily said, the look of alarm becoming one of horror. "With the weather as it is, we had them open this afternoon, remember?"

A look of horror to match his wife's pasted itself across James' face.

They both dashed for the sitting room.

Sure enough, behind the curtains, two of the sash windows of the living room were still open, the lower sashes raised right up. A curious small child on a broom able to get past the curtains could have exited either with little problem.

"I'll call Dumbledore, and get the other Marauders in to help look." James said, now looking slightly greenish in the face. "We _have_ to find him."

* * *

The search in the increasingly sultry night, executed by a number of increasingly desperate witches and wizards, with the brooding air of a possible thunderstorm impending overhead, took several hours. It turned out, in the end, that highly bewildered muggles of a national grid repair team had already discovered Harry, which meant that the by that point grim proceedings had to be complicated further by involving obliviators. The fact that as a security measure Harry had had a number of anti-tracking charms applied to him which had needed to be bypassed, once it was clear he was nowhere near the house, hadn't helped the witches and wizards catch up to him with any speed.

Somehow, Harry had apparently travelled half a mile or so from the house, on his toy broom, and at the end of his ride must have accelerated down a slope, weaving through trees, giving him speed and at the end over a fallen tree or embankment 'taking off' and getting lift far above what the toy broom should have ordinarily been capable of achieving.

He'd apparently soared up into the early evening sky where the trees ended, on his broom, and collided with an object. Probably he hadn't been going fast enough for the actual collision to have damaged him, given all the cushioning charms on the broom.

The object he'd collided with had, however, been the ceramic insulator by which a high-tension cable was suspended from a muggle electricity pylon.

In terms of electrical conductivity Harry and his broom had proved capable of bridging the gap between the suspended cable and pylon it was hung from, which the insulator with which he had collided was supposed to ensure against.

In so far as the bizarre and tragic accident had _any_ merit, it was that at least death must have been practically instantaneous.

That wasn't much comfort to James and Lily Potter though.

* * *

"Curious." said Lord Voldemort to his inner circle of Death Eaters. "I settle upon the Potter child as the one I need to eliminate to prevent from becoming my nemesis, and after futile months of searching, fate and unusually careless parents conspire to do away with him. Clearly, the pure-blood Longbottom boy is the one with whom I should be concerning myself, after all."

* * *

"You're _really_ not welcome at home right now, Sirius." James said. "Lily blames herself and me as parents for leaving Harry alone for ten minutes, and for leaving the windows open, and for even not simply taking the broom off him. But she blames you, too, for getting him that broom in the first place."

* * *

"They want _what_?" Severus Snape asked Albus Dumbledore.

"James is of the opinion that another child is what Lily needs right now." Albus said. "They are both emotionally distraught, as you might imagine, and if _I_ do not assist, I would not put it past James to go to a less reliable source, or even to try to brew such a potion himself. You are as aware as I of James' track record in potions classes at school, and that that was in a situation where his mind was _not_ unhinged by grief over the loss of a child. And despite your youth, you are the most competent potions brewer that I know of, Severus."

"Very well, Albus, as I would not want Lily subjected to _anything_ which that imbecile of her husband tried to cook up on a stove in a second-hand cauldron." Severus said, after a few moments. "But I want your _word_ – your cast-iron guarantee – that you will ensure that _Lily_ is an active and willing party to this plan of her husband's, and you will pass on specific _written_ instructions so that James Potter doesn't accidentally overdose either of them."

There was a long pause.

"That is agreeable." Albus Dumbledore said at last. "And since Lord Voldemort is anxious for _any_ kind of gossip of Order Members these days, and I think that this is relatively harmless enough, you may mention it to him when next you next report. I think it will amuse him, to hear of what he will no doubt consider the weakness and sufferings, of others…"

Severus scowled as if he would have rather that the headmaster _had_ forbidden it that he talk of such.

"Don't think that just because their son is dead, that the Dark Lord will completely forget about the Potters, Severus." Albus Dumbledore continued. "Your _best_ hope of ensuring their continued protection is for you to continue to work with _me_. To which end, I believe that Horace Slughorn would really rather like a break from teaching, and perhaps it would suit both Lord Voldemort _and_ myself, were you to apply for the position of Potions Master here at Hogwarts…"

* * *

Author Notes:

For the purposes of this story I have imagined that the sitting room windows of the house the Potters were in at the time of this piece were as indicated. They may be assumed to go sufficiently close to the floor that if the lower sash were open, Harry would be able to get out of it on his toy broom. The Potters probably had windows open _and_ some sort of cooling charms running in the house earlier in the day.

Because the curtains _were_ already drawn shut, it wasn't obvious to James that the windows were open when he left Harry in the sitting room. '_Out of sight, out of mind_', as the saying goes – especially given that he'd just received some sort of bad news about another Order of the Phoenix member, which meant he was in a distracted state.

The 'national grid' is the UK's electricity distribution network.

To try to clarify in response to one early review, Harry gets up sufficiently high in the air for the final collision by building up speed and momentum and at the end going over an obstacle which like a ski or snowboarder's ramp converts some of the forward momentum into travel at an angle upwards against gravity. Harry's broom isn't contributing any 'lift' at all in the last few moments of his flight. It's the _speed_ he built up before reaching the point of take-off. To my mind (and assumed for the purposes of this story), the fact that the toy broom _does_ have such a restricted 'ceiling' at which it moves above the ground (normally) indicates it interacts sufficiently with gravity for speed to be built up in a 'downhill rush'.

By a 'high-tension cable' I mean an overhead power line. Overhead power lines of the time between large metal pylons would not have been wrapped in any kind of insulating material, as far as I can determine, since the air (and ceramic insulators from which they hung from pylons) were supposed to provide all the insulation the cables required. Whilst some sort of barbed wire and/or fence around the base of pylons would have been likely present to prevent casual access at ground-level, Harry of course soared over that on his broom.

James Potter is not indicated in canon to have any particular faculty with potion brewing, to the best of my knowledge. In so far as it matters, for the purposes of this universe, I have assumed transfiguration was his 'thing', and he was a rather average student in potions at best.

This story is a one-shot.


End file.
